Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Matthew 4:18-22

I'm torn between two thoughts here: 1) must be nice when God Himself just says outright what He wants you to do, a simple statement really, and 2) did they actually know that it was Jesus, not just some crackpot Messiah like they had every other week during that time?

Both are fairly irreverent, so I'm going to go with the third thought the gospel provoked: James and John's father was in the boat - was he called too? Was he also meant to come? Did Jesus go along the whole beach that day or just to the four who came with him?

You get to thinking a lot, during an election year, about the kind of person you'd want to follow. And the kind of person you would follow, and if they're different. Who is it that you would drop everything for? Risk everything for? What would you have to know about them? What experience would you have had to have of them?

Perhaps one of the reasons elections are always so frustrating and unsatisfying is that we haven't figured out how to answer those questions.

But I wonder: if Jesus did walk up, would I trust that leap in my soul that says that it really is Him? I'd like to think that I would drop my nets in an instant if I knew it was Him, but what does it take to trust that you know a thing like that?

Because I have an overactive imagination and I've cultivated a hefty self-editing system (if nothing else so I can stop obsessing over uneven numbered sets of stairs), so I wonder how much of God I'm convincing myself I made up. And how much I am.

Sometimes I worry that God is always speaking to me through things like the television shows I like or beautiful coincidences or a perfectly-timed-for-irony song coming on the background music of a public place. Is it because I'm drowning out the straightforward message that He's speaking to me through what I am paying attention to?

Don't get me wrong, it's only showing His love for me. I've always felt doubly blessed when I feel like I had a truth pointed out to me from an unlikely source of grace - when a science fiction shows me what a Biblical story means - that God cared so much for me to know it, that He is talking to me through everything in the world...but I worry that I'm drowning Him out so He has to sneak in.

I worry I'd be too in the zone of fishing, I worry I wouldn't even hear His shouts from the beach, like James and John's father. I worry that I'm asking so loud I don't hear the answer. I worry I'm so determined not to trust all the answers I get that I leave God no choice but to slip His words into other mediums.

I worry I would know that it was Jesus calling on the shore, but I wouldn't trust myself to know it. I would refuse to let myself act on what I knew, convinced I couldn't know. Perhaps that's like James and John's father.